Fetishes and Magical Items

(this is a long piece, and has many wonderful graphics -- you can read as it loads....)

Magic, Fetishes, and Belief

Magic is such a tricky word. If you use it too often, people write you off as a crackpot. If you use it to describe people or places or things -- they assume you're just nuts or heretically gullible.

Even worse, spoken in the wrong place at the wrong time, it can get you burned at the stake. In a less wrong, but still inappropriate gathering, it can just get you ostracized or left out of the grown-up conversation.

So why do I risk it and use the word for this page? Because there is Level 2 / System 2 mysticism associated with things and places in spite of our maturity, age, sophistication, and cynicism. They are things which call up stories and metaphor and history and deity and religion and worship and prayer and sacrifice and alters and incense and hope and time and faith and rhythm and drums and pipes and contact between us and the unknown... and all those other magical, mystical ideas from our past. And if you know me, you know how important it is to me to include a healthy participation and respect for our tribal and mystical past in our present lives.

The truth is, I am a firm believer in magic. -- Just not the hocus pocus, jeelie-ocus kind. I have a firm respect for herbalists, even though in other times and places, they were considered witch-doctors, shamen, and potion-brewers.

I know from years of experiences and observations that hypnotism and its brethren, incantation, recited prayer, and chanting can have a strong effect on human behavior.

People who practice this kind of magic are called witches, priests, therapists, counselors, monks, parents, and stage hypnotists.

I believe that belief and prayer by itself can change the human body or the world around us.

People who practice this kind of magic are sometimes called faith healers, sometimes called ministers, and sometimes called physicians, and sometimes just called the faithful.

I know that people are willing and even ravenous for something to believe in -- so much so that con-artists and ego-maniacs like Hitler, Manson, Jones, and Koresh can hold them captive by their fear and belief and shake them until they fall out of the tree.

And that is the kind of magic practiced by centuries of wicked people who liked to endow themselves with titles like sorcerer, wizard, magician, and witch. Or sometimes they just called themselves "leaders of men."

And I believe very strongly in the power of stories, metaphors, symbols and tales to strenthen and enlighten the human condition both in general and in specific. I know that the unconscious mind speaks fluent metaphor -- and so does magic. At the deepest level, we understand dreams and visions in the same way we create and understand all art. Unconsciously.

Music, dance, poetry, drama, painting, photography, sculpture, story, archetecture. Magic, every one.

Our conscious mind may appreciate it and admire it -- but it is our subconscous which uses it and thrives on it. There is a reason we remember the stories we were told as children. The Grimms' and Anderson's and even Oscar Wilde's. Pushkin's and Shakespeare's and Aesop's. Stories from the Old Bible and from Singer. Even Walt Disney's butchered commercialism and Rocky and Bullwinkle's Fractured Fairy Tales. Schoolhouse Rock, The Grinch and his dog, and Luke Skywalker. One and all they are the stuff dreams are made of. And they are made of magic. It runs as deep in us as the river of chocolate in Willy Wonka's factory, and is as sweet as the doorjam on the gingerbread cottage.

I still remember the paintings by the masters which filled the Bible on my mother's coffee table because I would sit for hours studying them. And I remember the beautiful drawings and illustrations that filled my storybooks. To see any of them today stirs something so deeply a part of me that I momentarily transport back in time to my own house, sitting on the floor with my chin resting on the pages so I could stare long and hard at the people there.

And that is the magic I believe in.

So much of this kind of thing has fallen prey to our sophistication that there's hardly anything left except for the demographics of companies who merchandise to the masses. But the idea still holds in us.

For the most part, the things I call "magic" or "fetishes" are manmade. Many of them I consider art. Every bookstore in the world is crammed full of magical tales and dark tellings of lost children in little red capes and their adventures with wolves and bears and eagles and wicked witches.

My own collection of fairy tales, folk tales, and fables fills a dozen feet of bookshelf space and I have never tired of reading them.

Thousands of years of writers and story tellers... and then there are the artists.

There are hundreds of decks of playing cards and Tarot cards out there that have been painted, drawn, etched, collaged and photographed in the last 600+ years. For a historical look at the many styles and themes, take a look at the reference works written by Stuart Kaplan, founder of U.S. Games Systems -- the USA's largest manufacturer of playing cards and Tarot decks. He's even built a museum to house his extensive collection of historical decks and the works of new artists.

My favorite version of the story of how playing cards came into existence may or may not be true, but apocryphal stories sometimes have their own value whether true or not.

The story goes like this:

Chess was the Renaissance game of choice in the fashionable courts of Italy. At that time, chess was a 4-man game and was played as it often is today -- on a beautiful carved board with hand made pieces sculpted of expensive marble and treasured stone or wood. Artisans were paid handsomely for these beautiful game sets.

The problem was, a chessboard and it's pieces were often the size of large tables and so had to be permanent fixtures in homes large enough and wealthy enough to afford them. (not unlike a pool table today?)

And these Italian patrons of the arts were great lovers of their games... and wanted to be able to play them wherever they went. Their country estates.... Their ocean voyages.... Their picnics in the Tuscan countryside.... You know -- the kind of thing we all do.... (ahem...)

So one of these wealthy Italian patrons commissioned his artisans to make a "portable" chess set for his household.

And rather than carving a smaller marble or stone or wooden set -- this artist decided to make a series of small paintings which could be stacked and transported and then laid out on the chess board in place of the heavy sculptures.

And so the pawns became the pips (ace-10) and the chess court became the King, Queen, Jack (Rook), and Page (Bishop) of each suit. But instead of just painting generic kings and queens and Knights -- the artist painted portraits of the household. Including the wildcard fool (joker) who was the entertainer and storyteller of the house. [just think -- there was a time when there was no such thing as a "Wildcard!"]

Of course, every family of any position then had to have their own set of cards -- with their own portraits. And the less wealthy would buy knock-offs. And eventually the printing press would make these knock-offs available to the commoners (or at least the commoners with coin....)

Before long, the members of the patron household would be sitting and playing their newly invented card games -- and notice that they held in their hands the portraits of Uncle Luigi and cousin Bette -- you know Luigi and Bette? The ones who sneak off to the garden every chance they get?

Or they'd see Mama and Papa there together and conversation would turn to Mama's health or the fight they had over the Bishop's request for more money....

And so different cards began to take on different meanings until before long, the deck had evolved from a portable chess set -- to a means of talking about daily life. AND to divine it.

When Uncle Luigi turned up next to Opheliathe upstairs maid on the board -- then of course everyone would begin to watch Ophelia more closely and notice if she ever was difficult to locate when Luigi was out of pocket. And the appearance of the joker was never a good sign.

And so gypsies, tramps and thieves began to take these cards which had acquired their own little stories and their own divinatory meanings and mold the belief and superstition into something more powerful. Parlor game intuition became another branch of old world mysticism and magic.

And I don't know how true any of that is -- but the ideas are probably true even if the facts aren't. Nobody knows where the 21 (0r 22) trump cards of the Tarot deck came from or how they got added to the 4-player chess set, but it does make a kind of intuitive sense that if the chess cards were being used as icons for the family divine, that adding these universal symbol cards would flesh out the juicy revelations.

And don't we just love juicy revelations? I've already written about whether or not people really want to know the future, and about how I think simple fortune telling works, but that doesn't lessen my respect and fascination with the cards, teacups, talking boards, crystal balls, chicken bones (or entrails?), runes, wolf paws, daisy chains, i ching wands, talking coins, scrying mirrors, smudge pots, spirit boxes, mojo pouches, prayer boxes, animal carvings, ash jars, shark teeth, stone knocks, and all the other items people have invested with the power to tell them how to live their lives.

But I add a few other things to my list of magical items and fetishes. For me, there is something very interesting about containers in general. So many of the the things listed above are containers. Pots, boxes, pouches, jars, bags, cups, bowls, bottles, lamps, -- all those common containers which, like the bedroom closet on a dark and stormy night, tend to contain ghosts, spirits, and monsters.

And magic.

My favorite containers are painted boxes. Like the cards, you get not only the box itself, but the mind of the artist who painted it. And then there's LUGGAGE. With luggage, you get a place to carry your stuff when you travel -- but even when you don't there is potential for filling the suitcase with these magical items which transport the mind to faraway places. There's something in there besides memory.

Which is also why I love decks of cards. Each deck represents the conscious and unconscious mind of the artist. Even cards decorated with computer art still bear the mark of the artist who used the machine as others would use a brush or pen. There is something wonderful and communicative about these cards -- because even though the cards themselves may not tell us the past or present or future -- the artist who created them is is telling us a lot. And communicating in that most unconscious language of metaphor or symbol.

So I own magic things. Fetishes. Mystical artwork. Artifacts of divination. Lucky charms.

Chances are, so do you. At their heart, all card games are played with the same magical cards our Italian artisan created as a portable chess set. Dice aren't called bones for nothing -- you toss chicken bones and I Ching wands every time you roll for doubles to get out of Parker Brother's jail. And gamblers who chant (incant) "baby needs a new pair of shoes" are praying to somebody as they throw the bones on the craps table or watch to see where a tiny steel ball lands on a roulette wheel -- the old "Wheel of Fortune."

"round and round and round it goes
where it stops, nobody knows!"

How odd and compartmentalized our sophistication is!!!

Rabbit's foot, anyone? Prayer chant? Choosing rhyme?

"Roly poly rigamoly,
choose my love, strong and holy,
whether young or ashen gray,
make him love me 10,000 day"

Do we believe in magic? Sure. We believe in luck. We believe in monsters under the bed and haunted houses and gremlins in the machine. We believe in things unseen and hoped for. We believe in all kinds of things we never justify or explain.

We believe.

We believe in magic. We believe in ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night. We believe in legends and superstitions, too.

Some of us don't bother to temper the unknown with the known -- and that's probably as big a mistake as failing to temper the unconscious with the conscious. Physics and metaphysics are meant to be together like a horse and carriage; and the unconscious and conscious are meant to work together. Intuition is worth far less in the hands of a mindless gossip than in the hands of a skilled therapist or counselor -- whether the counselor is licensed or the matriarch of the family. And worth far more in the hands of a parent or lover than when misused by charlatans and swindlers.

Magic has the best of all possible associations with our innocent childhood and the worst of all possible associations with our cynical adulthood; and yet, unbelief requires an act of will and belief comes as easily as breathing.

So important is it that we discount, ridicule, or despise both unbelieving children and believing adults.

For me, I collect artifacts of divination. Either antique or historical, or just contemporary and unusual. There are dozens of hand painted tarot decks by various artists out there that haven't been picked up by one of the commercial card publishers,and some of them are magnificent collections of handheld art. It becomes a gauntlet thrown down to painters, photographers and artists of all kinds to reinterpret the meanings and symbolism in their own style and voice.

And there are always antique Ouija/Talking boards floating around at flea markets, garage sales, and auctions. Magic trunks, pouches, bottles and boxes are everywhere -- just ask a child. Even C.S. Lewis had a magic wardrobe -- and nobody ever thought badly of him because of it.

Fortune tellers and oracles are easy to come by. On the net, you can find dozens -- hundreds -- of those 900-number psychics and readers to fill your credit card with debt and your imagination with ideas. But the ones that are most charming are the computer generated ones. Did you see the "Oracle" on my "Welcome to Lynn's House" page? Or, go the New Orleans Mardi Gras site and let The Voodoo Queen read your fortune... There are auto-tellers at the Osho Zen site, and at Hollywood Tarot where the cards are made from photographs of famous celebrities. Chances are, the answer you get from any of these cyber-gypsies will be as valid as anything you pay money for.

The one thing that seems most true about monsters under the bed, magic boxes, and mystical cards is that their magic is context dependent. And their context is us. Without us, they're no more magical than dirt and tree bark. (an no less....) But without us, magic wouldn't exist. Magic is in the mind of the beholder as much as it is in the hands of the magician. We are really the magic in the cards -- and we are the monster in the closet. We are the ones who really know about Luigi and Ophelia. And we are the ones who throw the dice.

It's US and it always has been. The artifacts, cards, cups, and runes are just the inert carriers of our own intuition, imagination, and intelligence.

Amazing.

If you're interested in your own fetishes: cards, books, crystal balls, tea cups, 8-balls, scrying glasses or any of the other beads, baubles, and bangles of divination -- there are always retailers who can sell you something interesting -- as long as you bring your own magic (BYOM). Even better are the hundreds of magical artists -- that would be almost all artists by my count since they all seem to know the muses and fortune like family.

There's an old wives' tale (or old witches' tale?) that such artifacts are only truly "charged" with magic if they are given to you by someone magical. I even have my own stories about that.... But in the real world -- that advice and $3.75 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

If, on the other had, you have confidence in your own BYOM, then here are some good links to online resources:

Salem Tarot Page	Folly of the Alchemist
Esoteric WebLink Index	Mama Rose's Kitchen
Tapestry Magazine	Witches' Voice, Boston
Fournier Cards	R. Somerville of Edinburgh
Collector Playing Cards For Sale	Playing Card Page
Cards and More	Mabel's Card Shack
Annie Sprinkle's	52 Plus Joker
Pannonia	Rare Playing Cards
Spielkarten und Papier	The Race Card
Bob Lancaster Gallery	International Playing Card Society
Links To Tarot Decks	U.S. Games Systems

*decks I would like to acquire:
*teacups/cups I would like to acquire:
*luggage I would like to acquire -- almost any new or used, good to moderate condition, leather or carpet bag. Especially doctor's bags, carpet satchels, and steamer-type hard cases. Bags with "character".

**If I have used a card above without linking it to an available online resource, and if one of these cards is your artwork/design/publication -- please email me and I will correct the problem. I would like to alwasy give proper credit for artwork. Some of these were sent to me as attachments and I have no idea where to find their web-page or supplier.**

Copyright (C) 1999, Lynn Maupin Webb
http://www.fortunecity.com/lavendar/ducksoup/555
Reproduction or distribution in any form of material contained in this site without credit to Lynn Maupin Webb and reference to this email address is strictly prohibited.
L.M. Webb can be emailed at purciful@yahoo.com